First, global warming con man Al Gore compared companies’ search for energy to “junkies looking for another vein.” Now self-described communist, Obama pal, and 9/11 truther Van Jones one-ups the master. Jones advances the original but totally absurd argument that oil is “death” and that because we use oil our society is death-centered.

We have an energy system, a civilization powered by death. Fueled by death. Why do they call them fossil fuels?
We act shocked, having pulled death out of the ground, that we get death out of the skies. Let’s stop fueling death.

This is an argument fashioned for ignoramuses and morons, who are, of course, Jones’s natural constituency.

Let’s think about his argument. Because we put “dead” stuff like petroleum to productive use instead of leaving it in the ground where it remains useless to human beings, we are exhuming death and shouldn’t be surprised that we “get death out of the skies.”

What does that last part even mean? How are we getting death out of the skies? Don’t we have to wait for most of our food, whether vegetables or meat, to be dead in order to eat it? Doesn’t virtually every living thing on the planet eat things that are dead? Should we be allowed to consume only living things such as yogurt and inanimate things such as water?

How does Jones come up with this bombastic drivel?

And to think, Jones criticized my writing, the wordcraft of a professional who has been writing and getting paid for it for almost a quarter century, calling my work “purple prose.”

This is what Alinskyites like Jones do: they ridicule because they believe, as Alinsky taught, that ridicule is a powerful tool. Saul Alinsky’s fifth rule of “power tactics” from Rules for Radicals is that ridicule “is man’s most potent weapon.” It is a rhetorical weapon of mass destruction. “It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule,” he wrote. “Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.” It is comparatively easy to get away with threatening the enemy. “You can insult and annoy him, but the one thing that is unforgivable and that is certain to get him to react is to laugh at him. This causes irrational anger.”

The problem with this thinking is that once you understand what an Alinskyite like Jones is trying to do, it’s fairly easy not to be bothered by such an attempt at ridicule. You can revel in it and throw it right back at him.